The Thirty Nine Steps (1978)
A Game of Terror Begins!
I'm an unashamed fan of John Buchan. Rather unfashionably, I love all that stuff: Ripping Yarns, the Stiff Upper Lip, the Boy's Own stories of G. A. Henty, Dr. Arnold at Rugby — Play up! Play up! And Play the Game! Unsurprisingly, I'm also a fan of Buchan's hero, Major-General Sir Richard Hannay, KCB, OBE, DSO.
In Mr. Standfast (1919), the philistine Hannay is summoned from the trenches and sent to investigate a sinister, rather precious 'model' town near Birmingham — one of those Lutyen-sy Arts & Crafts numbers (pixies skipping down the lavender-scented crazy paving), populated with writers, artists and suspect pacifists in suede shoes. Vegetarians. Like Evelyn Waugh's take in the hilarious Put Out More Flags (1942) — in which the heroic Basil Seal dumps a party of Irish cockney slum children on the Harknesses — a ghastly middle-aged couple retired from the Colonies, an old, lichen-encrusted Cotswold Mill House and all, plus well, babbling brook and loom. It's one of the funniest things. Has me on the floor, doubled up, every time. Literally.
Buchan's thriller, The Thirty-Nine Steps, was published in 1915 but written just before the outbreak of the Great War. It's typical, in a way, of many other paranoid novels of the period, sometimes described as 'Invasion Fiction'. Erskine Childers The Riddle of the Sands (1903), later made into a cracking film by Rank, is sometimes described as the first spy novel. In 1906, William Le Queux's now forgotten If England were Invaded (in which Germany lands a significant army on the Norfolk coast) was a phenomenal bestseller and created nationwide hysteria. Saki, likewise, investigated similar territory in When William Came, A Story of London under the Hohenzollerns (1913). If The Daily Mail was to be believed, dastardly German spies were everywhere and anywhere — like the ridiculous, tweedy Vulgarian secret agents in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968).
This was the age of the Clubland Hero. Of Dornford Yates' jolly japes and Sapper's (aka Lt Col. H. C. McNeile. MC, Royal Engineers) undesirable Bulldog Drummond — “nothing like a jolly good thrashing before breakfast.” And it's the age of the Gentleman Amateur, now, alas, a vanished breed, where a pukka civilian can ‘help’ MI5, with a doff-capping Scotland Yard more than happy to allow a plucky ‘officer and gentleman’ to take the lead, no questions asked.
Buchan's thriller, The Thirty-Nine Steps, has been transferred to the silver screen three times. The first, starring Robert Donat, is the 1935 Hitchcock version in black and white, which deviates considerably from the original book and features a mysterious Mr. Memory, the Forth Bridge and a handcuffed chase across the Highlands. The second, released in 1959, stars a contemporary Kenneth Moore in glorious Eastmancolor. The third, directed by Don Sharp, stars Robert Powell, aka Jesus of Nazareth.
Good old Don Sharp. If you’re a lover of 1970s British B-movie cinema, you’ll recognise his name. The genius behind The Brides of Fu Manchu (1966), Rasputin the Mad Monk (1966) (starring Tom Baker and a rancid wig), Dark Places (1973), starring Joan Collins and Robert Hardy, various episodes of The Avengers and the guilty pleasure which is Hammer House of Horror (1980). The Thirty Nine Steps (1978) is a film for a rainy Bank Holiday Monday — a nostalgia fest for the fag end of the British film industry, or at least the demise of the splendid Rank Organisation as loss-making film producer, as opposed to profitable distributor.
As much as I like Robert Powell in The Thirty Nine Steps (1978) (his readings of the M. R. James Christmas ghost stories are marvellous), he's possibly miscast. Isn't he more a theatrical Hampstead type? And I can confirm that, as I once had the good fortune to live almost directly opposite the great man — in one of the more salubrious streets in Old Hampstead Village — although admittedly, it was more of a nodding acquaintance. And isn't Hannay a bit more public-school, of the Victorian army incarnation? Paul Scott's 'Chillingborough', Cheltenham, Wellington, Haileybury or Marlborough? A bit more stiff upper lip? Powell's Hannay likes a bit of histrionics: there's quite a bit of banging on tables and staring moodily at the wall. Or is he? Hannay, after all, is a tough colonial, a Scots-Rhodesian mining engineer, a copper prospector in German Demarland, a former subaltern in the Imperial Light Horse. In any event, Powell became associated with the role, and (I think) the spin-off ITV television series Hannay (1988) went on to relative success.
There's a lovely, magnificent, stellar cast. Sir John Mills, Ronald Pickup, George Baker, Eric Porter, David Warner, and Timothy West. They're all in it. And Karen Dotrice (little Jane Banks in Mary Poppins) is the love interest. I'm especially taken with David Warner as the rather sinister villain, a gaslight ghoul, amplified by top hat, sword stick and swirling London fog amongst the Gothic cloisters of Lincoln’s Inn. Warner plays a similar role in Time after Time (1979), in which H. G. Wells chases Jack the Ripper to 1970s San Francisco.
And there's lovely location work. The Albert Hall, in an almost identical scene in The Ipcress File (1968), the wild moors of Dumfries and Galloway, Drumlanrig Castle, Marylebone Station, that perennial stand in for St Pancras: the romance of the 10.30 to Inverness, the romance of helmeted Bobbies beating the misty moors, shotguns and high-collared capes à la Agatha Christie. These things turn me on. I'm also turned on by the Fokker Eindecker or Morane-Saunier monoplane, which appears from nowhere and hunts Hannay down across the magnificent Scottish landscape. There's a similar scene in Hitchcock's North by Northwest (1959), referenced later, funnily enough, in Dr Who's The Deadly Assassin (1978). But it's originally Buchan. In turn, the influence for Geoffrey Household's Rogue Male (1939), the upper-class gentleman assassin stalking Hitler — actually, thinking about it, not unlike the unnamed assassin in The Day of the Jackal (1973).
Railway buffs might be upset by The Thirty Nine Step's LMS composite coaches (designed in 1947), in a film supposedly set on the pre-grouping Midland Railway of 1913, but hey! This is 1913 as seen from 1978. I like that. And I'm also a fan of the way art directors fashioned 'Edwardian' sets in the 1970s; the William Morris wallpaper, converted oil lamps, dried flower arrangements, brown mahogany, painted shutters, Staffordshire figures and the rest. Actually, more North London, circa 1974. Glorious Pinewood. And if the '60s were obsessed with the Victorian, then the 1970s were obsessed with the Edwardian; this idea of a pre-1914 Golden Age, which never existed— very much a reaction, I think, to the oil crisis and economic instability, metamorphosing into a romantic, Laura Ashley fuelled nostalgia fest, The Railway Children (1970), Seven Little Australians (1973), Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975); Truly Scrumptious, white painted garden furniture and garlanded swing in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968).
Of course, the bit everybody remembers is the Big Ben sequence at the end, with Mr. Powell dangling from the clock hands of St Stephen's Tower. Despite the Pinewood fibreglass, it still makes my palms sweat. It's almost a direct nick from the Will Hay comedy My Learned Friend (1943), in turn, lifted, I suspect, from Harold Lloyd's silent, Safety Last (1923). And it's not in the original Buchan, which — less excitingly — has the thirty nine cut into the chalk of the Broadstairs cliff face.
Still, Don Sharp’s version of The Thirty Nine Steps is the most faithful of all the films to the original book. It is, at least, set in 1913 going on 1978. And, before I forget, Ed Welch’s splendid soundtrack is a romantic piano concerto in the style of Greig or Rachmaninov: The Thirty-Nine Steps Concerto, played by the equally splendid Rank Concert Orchestra, which some kind person has uploaded from vinyl onto YouTube — although, I think, in the film version there’s the tinkle of harpsichord (‘skeletons copulating on a tin roof’, as Sir Thomas Beecham once put it). Very 70s that. The harpsichord. They don’t make film music like that anymore.
I watched The Thirty Nine Steps (1978) on DVD and it’s also available as a download from Amazon Prime video.
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Admirably erudite, like all your postings. They are oases of scholarship in a wilderness of cliche. // Nobody to my knowledge has tried to adapt one of my favourite Buchan novels, GREENMANTLE, even though its theme of a new Muslim messiah, not to mention a cross-dressing spy, dope etc, would appear to be a la mode.
Watched this last month on the basis that I live in that particular wilderness of Dumfriesshire postcode DG3. One aspect you don't mention is that the script really is the most frightful tosh - even more so than the original. The pickup of the aristocratic shooting lassie is especially implausible. Well the clock business is too of course. I do prefer the Hitchcock version where the moodiness outweighs the silliness. Saw the Roger Moore one at school when it first came out and remember it as jolly exciting!! Though disappointed at the time that they didn't recreate the villain who could "hood his eyes like a hawk". Should I rewatch?